Journal of Global History (2019), 14: 3, 375–394 doi:10.1017/S1740022819000172
ARTICLE
The global/local tension in the history of anthropology
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
Department of Cultural Studies, Universidad Aut´onoma Metropolitana, Lerma, Mexico Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with ‘global’ visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label ‘globalization’ generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homo- geneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on ‘the global’ within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplin- ary debates, and wider historical junctures.
Keywords: diffusionism; ethnography; evolutionism; local/global; Marxism
This article aims to explore the different ways in which anthropologists have dealt with ‘globali- zation’. To understand anthropology’s contribution to this large field of debate and theoretical discussion, I start by introducing a brief statement of what globalization and anthropology are. Since globalization is a historical process, I focus first on the beginning of anthropology as a discipline in order to present the transformations of some of its continuing preoccupations that are related to the larger field of global studies: the tensions between local and distant supra- local forces, and the tensions between heterogeneity and homogeneity. Globalization can be defined as the increase of the influence of supra-local agents and agencies in a myriad of locales making up webs of planetary scope. The noun ‘increase’ points to a process that unfolds over time, the ground zero of which is the beginning of the world capitalist system in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although some authors such as Andre Gunder Frank have argued that there were other world systems before the European one, I take the his- torical expansion of Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia to be the beginning of the existence of the ‘modern world-system’, to use Immanuel Wallerstein’s well-known term.1 This expansion signals the building of interconnections and exchanges among loci and peoples on a truly plane- tary scale. The term ‘globalization’ was popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. Before it became another buzzword, within and without academia, it was discussed by scholars interested in the political economy of capitalist expansion, and in colonialism, imperialism, international relations, modernization, and development.
1Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: global economy in the Asian age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; Immanuel Wallerstein, The modern world-system: capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century, New York: Academic Press, 1974. © Cambridge University Press 2019.